Page 6 of Her Leading Lady

“Miss Halloran.” Jonathan gestured at a chair with real warmth, the warmth of a man who has checked what you cost. “How would you like to save this production?”

She sat, and said nothing, which four a.m. bar shifts had taught her was the strongest opening available to a woman with no cards.

It came out in his smooth paragraphs. Celia Marsh’s injury: grave, though they were devastated, naturally, on a personal level. The run: sold to ninety-one per cent through Christmas, a figure that could not simply be refunded into the Thames. The insurers, a nod to the sky woman, required the production to mitigate its losses. The box office required a Constance. And the medical advice, here Jonathan steepled his fingers, was that with rest and management Miss Marsh might sustain a reduced schedule. Five performances a week. Perhaps, in time.

“Which leaves three,” said Wren.

“Which leaves three.” Jonathan smiled the smile of a man arriving at a slide he’d prepared. “A formal role-share. You’d play Wednesday evenings, matinees, and Mondays, guaranteed, contracted, not cover, the role is yours those nights whether Celia’s fit or not. Programme credit as Constance, alternating. It’s an elegant solution.”

“It’s a fire sale,” said Wren, pleasantly, “and I’m the extinguisher you already had on the wall.”

The general manager looked at her folder. The insurance woman looked at Wren for the first time with something like interest.

“I’ll want my name on the front of house board,” Wren said. “Not inside the programme in the thanks. On the board, same size as hers, from the first performance. I’ll want full billing on the poster site by the stage door, the online listings amended within the week, and the press release to say the word co-lead, not cover, not standby, not stepping up. I’ll want the same access to stage time, wig calls, and wardrobe as Miss Marsh, pro rata, in writing. And I’ll want understudy buyout money for the ten years, no, sorry, that one’s a joke, but I did want you to hear it out loud once.” She stood up. “You can have my answer when I’ve seen the paper.”

Silence of a purity she would remember on her deathbed.

“They told me you were word-perfect,” said Jonathan at last, and there was something new in his voice, a recalibration, the sound of a man moving a figure from one column to another. “They didn’t mention you could negotiate.”

“Nobody mentions anything about me, Mr Wexler. That’s been the whole arrangement.”

She walked out of the production office with her knees going and made it as far as the front-of-house stairs before she had to sit down on the red carpet among the framed photographs of the theatre’s hundred years, and breathe, and let the shaking have its four minutes. Below her, through the glass of the locked foyer doors, London went by in the wet dusk: buses, umbrellas, a man selling roasted chestnuts to a queue of nobody. Ten years. She had walked past that chestnut man ten years of evenings on the way to stand in the dark, and tonight, upstairs, in a room smelling of other people’s cigars, she had held four points of box office over the head of the most powerful producer in the West End and watched him fold. Her da’s voice arrived on cue, the old dismissals, there’s no living in it, love, and for the first time in a decade she found the voice had lost the argument and appeared to know it.

She got the board. She got the billing, the listings, the wardrobe parity; she got co-lead in the release, though it emerged from the press office worn down to sharing the role, which she decided to bank rather than fight. The contract came over by courier at nine that night to a flat that had never received a courier, and Deb stood in the kitchen doorway watching Wren read it at the table like a woman defusing something. She read it aloud in parts, because contracts read aloud lose their power to hurt you: the role of Constance Villiers shall be shared, the schedule of performances at Appendix B, billing as per clause fourteen, and Deb, who worked in insurance and understood documents, made her stop at clause fourteen and read it twice, and then said, quietly, “That’s your name, babe. In a legal document. Load-bearing.” And the two of them sat looking at clause fourteen in the kitchen’s yellow light with the traffic going by below, ten years and a water-stained ceiling and every unpaid Tuesday of the decade folded into one subordinate clause, until Deb got the good glasses down, the ones from her nan, and poured the last of Christmas’s amaretto, there being nothing else in the flat with a cork in it. They drank to clause fourteen, giggling like conspirators, which, Wren would think much later, is exactly what they had always been.

“This is it, isn’t it,” said Deb. “The actual it.”

“Sign of any weakness in this document, tell me. I’ve read it four times and I keep crying at the definitions section, which is affecting my judgment.”

At midnight she broke another promise to herself. She rang her da’s number and reached the voicemail he never checked. To the beep, she rehearsed the scene. Da, it’s me. You’re going to see my name outside a London theatre. Not hidden inside the programme. On the board, on the street, my actual name. Afterwards she listened to the Athlone silence and heard the old verdicts beneath it: notions; who do you think you are; there’s no living in it, love. She deleted the message before sending.

Then she sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed and interrogated the feeling in her chest, because it was not what the brochures had promised. Ten years she’d imagined this night. The call, the yes, the name on the board. In every version she had been incandescent, vindicated, drunk on it. What she actually felt was quieter and stranger and had a hole in the middle: the shot had come, the real one, and it had come because a woman she had watched for two thousand nights was lying in a hospital bed with her career in pieces, and Wren had hoped for it. Two nights ago, in the dark, gripping the fly rail, she had hoped, and the universe, with its appalling sense of humour, had heard.

You waited so long you went strange, she thought. You wanted so long the wanting learned to walk on its own.

She signed in the morning, at the theatre, at the long table, with Jonathan beaming and a photographer from the press office recording the moment Wren Halloran’s signature took eleven years’ weight. It was done in ninety seconds. Champagne appeared and was warm.

It was Trish Adeyemi, waiting in the corridor after with her lanyard and her air of having already read tomorrow’s script, who put the last piece on the table. She fell into step with Wren, walked her as far as the stairs down to the dressing rooms, and stopped.

“They tell you where you’re getting ready, these three nights a week of yours?”

“Dressing room two, I assumed. Or whatever’s free.”

“Number two’s up a flight of stairs, and four and five are up two. Building’s Victorian, there’s no lift backstage, and Herself is coming back on crutches whenever she comes back.” Trish let it land with the timing of a stage manager, which is to say perfectly. “There’s exactly one dressing room on the flat in this theatre, and her chair’s already in it.”

Wren stood at the top of the stairs with the corridor light buzzing overhead, warm champagne still bitter down the back of her throat, and began, slowly, to understand what she had signed.

“You’re joking me.”

“Dressing Room One,” said Trish, with the serenity of a woman handing over a live grenade and stepping back. “Two names going on that door tomorrow. Sleep well, Constance.”

Wren didn’t go home. She went down instead, one flight, along the green corridor with its ticking pipes, and stood in front of the door she had passed several thousand times in ten years and never once opened. CELIA MARSH, said the nameplate, brass, alone, the careful serif catching the corridor light. Below it, freshly drilled that afternoon by a carpenter working to an order Wren had negotiated from a hospital’s insurance panic, two small holes waited. She put her finger on the lower one, lightly, the way you test whether a thing is real. Tomorrow her name went into a wall that had held one name since before she came to England. She stood there long enough for Reg, passing on his round, to slow, take in the sight of the alternate communing with a door, and keep walking, because Reg had seen everything the building had to show him twice, and knew a threshold when he watched somebody stand on one.

CHAPTER 5

Celia made them bring her back on a Tuesday, eleven days after the fall, against the advice of the surgeon, the physio, Bunny, and a chorus of well-wishers whose cards she had read once and binned, because the first rule of a crisis is that you attend it in person or it gets decided without you.

The crutches were graphite, Swedish, the best that money could buy, and she hated them with a heat she usually reserved for critics who quoted other critics. Eleven days had taught her their grammar: the swing, the plant, the pivot, the small violence of kerbs. She had practised in the flat’s long hallway until her armpits burned, because if she was going to be seen like this, and she was, there was no version of this in which she was not seen, then she would be seen doing it well. Adequacy was a performance like any other. You rehearsed it.